May no Monogatari Mou: Part One (Saturn & PC Engine & PlayStation)

Welcome back to another season of May no Monogatari, wherein I spend the month of May checking out a few fan translations that have long piqued my interest. A few of these are games that I posited as "runners-up" for last year's May no Monogatari feature, though I've since also dug up a few others that tend to fit a few gameplay genres and formats I'm typically drawn towards; though they're less likely to have influenced the modern games I've been enjoying it's never best to underestimate the video game literacy of talented designers. Much like book authors and movie directors, it's often the case that the more expansive their own background as a media consumer the better their final output.

Dropping in on the reference-happy Policenauts last year was a trip I hope to replicate, to some degree, with this year's selections.

As before, I've limited my choices to one game per system: there may come a time where I want to take a deeper dive into, say, the Sega Saturn and the vast amount of its games that never left Japan (we in the west maybe saw 1/4 of that library), but that feels like that should be its own separate thing. In due time, perhaps. Still, I hope the obscure choices here inspire some renewed interest from an audience of already pretty dialed-in players around these parts. Without any further preamble let's get into the first of the fan-translated games I want to cover this May:

Sega Saturn: Linkle Liver Story (Nextech, 1996)

Linkle Liver Story, which is probably supposed to be Linkle River Story or Wrinkle River Story, was brought to my attention back when I was playing Crusader of Centy (known as Ragnacenty in Japan and Soleil in Europe) for some older feature or other. Linkle actually started as a Ragnacenty sequel but at some point the developers pivoted and made it an original property, with the only remaining connection between the two being that they share a top-down perspective and that you were followed around by an animal companion (sorta) that you could use while fighting. Developers Nextech, also known as Nex Entertainment, were primarily a porting studio that frequently worked with bigger companies like Sega, Namco, and Capcom; they ended up being purchased as a subsidiary studio by the first of those shortly after this game released. Along with Crusader of Centy they have credits on a surprising width of games, including the PS3 port of Bayonetta, home ports for several of the Time Crisis shooters, and as support devs for Resident Evil: Code Veronica and its "X" remaster.

Graphically Linkle Liver Story is about on par with some of the nicer-looking SNES games, like Secret of Evermore or Chrono Trigger. Saturn owners at the time were probably envious of the polygons PlayStation and N64 were tossing around but there's no doubting this aged better.

Linkle Liver Story is set in a forest village of anthros who have their peace shattered by a criminal mole calling itself Hungaro, whom has been digging up the countryside looking for something specific. Given that the village chief is fairly ancient by this point, it's up to his apprentice (the feisty player-named protagonist) and her new flying tree seed friend Puchi to step in and get to the bottom of what's happening with Hungaro and his machinations. The game uses a stage-based format, somewhat unusual for Zeldersatzes but this was also the case for Centy as well, where you might drop into a new stage, fight your way through several screens of enemies and traps to reach a boss, then grab whatever it was guarding and move onto the next area. However, the game provides a bit more variety than that with stages that provide something akin to a mini-game or a less combative goal to reach: for instance, you're tasked with finding three ingredients early on for a potion that will cure bad dreams after your friend falls into a restless coma. This involves fighting a boss for one of them, but the other two are found by cutting off the tail of a scaredy-cat lizard that you first have to play hide-and-seek with (the tail severing doesn't hurt him, not to worry) and by pushing a pollen ball around a long vertical course while avoiding any patches of water or turret enemies which can damage it. While a far cry from the sort of environmental puzzles you'd find in a typical Zelda, each of Linkle Liver Story's dungeons usually have some kind of specific trap or gimmick that you have to work around, whether that's a maze of switches to open up new passages or adjusting water levels in a series of concentric canals to reach the boss at its center.

Elemental Affinity = Strong. Acrobatics = High. Tact = Zero.

The most intriguing aspect of LLS is the weapon system. Throughout the game you'll find elemental seeds and wands representing the four seasons. The seeds can be used to craft a weapon of your choice at a level based on the amount of seeds you've found; so, if you've found two water seeds, you can craft a level 2 water weapon. The wands simply unlock new weapon slots so you can alternate between the four elements (or keep making weapons of the same element, if you wanted). What's more, the weapon creation area has three plants that confer bonuses to reach, damage, and speed respectively: when you plant the seed in range of one of those plants, you get a weapon built for that role, like say a boomerang for reach or a hammer for damage. You can, in addition, plant the seed in the Venn diagram overlap between two traits, giving you a weapon moderately strong in those two areas and weak in the third. A sword, for instance, is what results from combining strength and reach while an axe is strength and speed (which feels a bit backwards, but whatever). You can decide which weapon type you prefer and simply make one of them for each element, or you can mix and match both weapon types and elemental types for maximum coverage. It costs orbs to make weapons, which are dropped out of enemies and chests and can be farmed endlessly if needed, however while the enemies respawn if you revisit a location I'm fairly sure the chests don't; it therefore behooves you not to be too wasteful when crafting new gear. The game eventually unlocks a magic system, and these spells are linked to each element as well: some are damage-dealing while others can buff you temporarily, and one even acts as a heal. You can also permanently increase your HP by finding special plants out in the wild and giving them a small amount of your orbs.

There had to have been a more intuitive alternative for this weapon system.

While I did enjoy the game it does have a few issues. First is the very zoomed-in perspective that doesn't really help prepare you for enemy attacks coming from off-screen, especially where bosses are concerned. The hit detection can be iffy at times too and some enemies can easily swarm you by getting inside the reach of your weapons. On that note, though some weapons have better "reach" there's not a huge amount of extra distance, so you're often better relying on strength and speed weapons. That said, speed isn't always that handy for boss fights due to their small invulnerability periods and differences in strength aren't anywhere near as impactful as remembering to use the right elements against the right enemies. In the latter case, most enemies have a color that reflects their element: using blue (water) weapons on red (fire) enemies and vice versa usually does significant harm, as does using yellow (wind) on green (earth) enemies and vice versa. I went from needing three or four hits with a weapon specced for damage to having a weaker but fast and long-reached weapon (the spear) that was able to one-shot those same enemies due to its elemental advantage. It's pretty easy to fall off platforms into pits or deep bodies of water (your character can handle shallow pools at least) given some very exact definitions of where the ground begins and ends, though falling rarely does much damage to you—like with Zelda it's more a slap on the wrist if anything. You have a run function which you can activate by hitting the jump button twice and it's useful for getting around quickly, though you can easily trip over certain environmental features if you're not careful. The game's worst issue is something endemic to many CD games of the era: just a whole lot of loading between transitions, though rarely more than a few seconds. It happens frequently enough to regularly interrupt the pace, especially if you're retrying a boss fight several times over.

Like a nice spherical world map. Very Blast Corps.

There's an RA set for this one but I might not recommend it, given around half of it is for no-damage boss clears. Some bosses require you to take quite a trek from the last available checkpoint to where it can be fought and many have annoying patterns with a lot of projectiles or fast movements that are hard to avoid. It otherwise serves as an adequate guide to find upgrades and seeds—the achievement will usually have a description like "find the water seed in this particular dungeon", so you can be on the lookout once you get there without spoiling too much—and the usual standard progression milestones. But hey, that's all supplemental. I think this game has plenty of neat ideas going for it but the actual gameplay can be rough in spots and the feeling of it being some long lost 16-bit game (with some CD music and the occasional visual effects flourish) is inescapable. Still, games built like this weren't exactly common outside of Nintendo's systems (and only then it was usually just Zelda and maybe the occasional StarTropics if you're lucky) and if you happen to be a huge Centy fan there's no escaping that LLS is ultimately cut from the same cloth, even if the story doesn't get quite as wild and that you lack the complexity that came from having so many animal companions to choose between. (I've heard this downgraded feeling is something that affects the Saturn sequel to Legend of Thor (a.k.a. Beyond Oasis) as well, as the MD's other major Zeldersatz, so that's something I'll have to discover on my own one of these days too.)

PC Engine CD-ROM: Galaxy Fräulein Yuna (Red Company, 1992)

Ginga Ojou-sama Densetsu Yuna, usually localized as Galaxy Fräulein Yuna, is an adventure game developed by Red Company (the creators of Bonk, The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang, and the Far East of Eden/Tengai Makyou RPG series) and published by Hudson Soft for the PC Engine CD-ROM, i.e. the Japanese TurboGrafx-CD. It follows teenager (and ditz) Yuna Kagurazaka who wins a talent contest to become a galactic-level famous idol and (secretly) "the Savior of Light", as she eventually finds herself traveling beyond her 23rd century Neo-Tokyo suburban neighborhood and all-girls highschool to battle flamboyant rivals on other planets in sci-fi-tinged magical girl showdowns. The game was one of those fascinating early experiments with adventure gaming in the CD age, using a combination of anime-style visuals, a significant amount of voice acting, and a few CD audio songs (with vocals!) to prop up what is admittedly some extremely light adventure puzzles and a mostly arbitrary turn-based RPG battle system. It did well enough on the strength of its presentation alone—created by Mika Akitaka, a MS Gundam artist who had pioneered a style of moe gijinka (or "cute anthropomorphization"; Hyperdimension Neptunia, for instance, does this with video game consoles) called "MS Girls": anime girls decked out in what resembled Mobile Suit Gundam armor—that it saw multiple sequels and a few anime adaptations despite some middling reviews upon its release. I've always been mildly fascinated by the series, as someone who isn't a particularly big follower of Gundam or bishoujo anime, seeing as it's one of those short-lived phenomena that completely passed by the west (and, honestly, would've been nigh impossible to market to same). And, hey, not to get too inside baseball here but it's not easy finding a PC Engine CD-ROM game that's been fan translated and that I hadn't already covered years back with Octurbo-CD.

This is one of those games that plays an introductory cutscene if you let it sit on the title screen for a while, and the opening of the game's not going to make much sense without it. In short, twin-tails over here decided to rough up the neighborhood to get at Yuna.

The game exemplifies a standard Japanese adventure game of the era: you navigate the world via a menu, usually limited to either looking around, talking to nearby PCs, or moving to new locations. The game does occasionally offer choices but these are largely false branches: the story will proceed as it must no matter what you pick. Moreover, the game has a parodic edge to it where any attempt by the player to move away from the standard magical girl anime formula will typically net you some sarcasm from the peanut gallery, i.e. Yuna's mechanical companions that she can merge with during fights for added firepower. Speaking of which, Yuna will frequently bump into one of thirteen "Fräuleins of Darkness" and be forced to do battle with them. These play out as a turn-based interchange of attacks: it's an extremely limited system, where you'll usually use one of two attack types (dependent on whom you've merged with) which can potentially miss their target entirely or the option to just fling verbal abuse at your opponent instead. The insults always hit for a fixed amount of damage but they also reduce the wielder's "dignity"; you can waste a turn restoring this dignity if so desired or simply switch to the RNG-based normal attacks once it gets too low. Since it's a total crapshoot whether you win or lose, there's no game over states and the fight immediately restarts if you're defeated excepting one instance where it's not story-mandated that you succeed. To that effect, they don't really serve a purpose beyond breaking up the very straightforward adventure game aspect from time to time. Afterwards, your opponent lies unconscious, her armor strategically broken in a mildly suggestive way, and the adventure game half resumes.

The Fräuleins of Darkness are typically polite young ladies who have beef with Yuna for one reason or another. Some, though, are just jerks.

Galaxy Fräulein Yuna feels like it's meant to flow like an anime, which might explain why it often feels closer to a visual novel (or "digital comic", as some contemporary reviews put it) given your options are always strictly limited by both the tools at your disposal and the demands of the plot. Even in cases where you have multiple destinations to choose between, selecting one might immediately put you up against an obstacle you can't overcome until your business is concluded at the other site. The only merit to the combat is the part where you and your opponent can trade insults, which can be occasionally amusing, but is otherwise something you can just mash your way through until you emerge the victor. The game's writing and voice acting do find the right tonal balance between earnest magical girl shoujo and a somewhat mocking deconstruction of same, as the protagonist is rarely the brightest bulb and is easily distracted by typical schoolgirl things like sleeping and eating and clothes shopping when she's supposed to be saving the world, but it never comes off as too sexist either: the rest of the cast are women too and, with the exception of the equally eccentric (and usually one-note) Fräuleins of Darkness, are much more level-headed and focused. Also, while completely subject to taste, the '90s J-pop soundtrack has a few bangers and overall does a fine task of striking the right chord for what they're going for here vibes-wise.

Jeez, Yuna, it's standing right there. What's with all the sassy heroines this month?

Galaxy Fräulein Yuna is ultimately a gossamer-thin gaming experience that is big on presentation and light on substance, a common complaint for most CD games in that pre-PlayStation era, and that's evinced enough by its RA set being mostly progression-based with the rest earned by triggering certain jokey asides and potential fail states (though the game has no alternative "bad endings" as such). The fan translation does some good work in getting the humor across, even if I'm still mostly mystified by the decision to change "ojou-sama" (an anime archetype of a rich, sheltered girl who frequently laughs dismissively) to "fräulein" (the general term for a younger woman in German)—a localization choice that happened before this fan translation came to be, I'm to understand. I've also read that future Galaxy Fräulein Yuna entries expand on the combat engine somewhat, with one released on Saturn opting for a tactical RPG format closer to Fire Emblem, so maybe that's where the series picks up. As we get closer to yet another summer of anime with Game OVA I'll admit to being curious about those OVA adaptations also; specifically, settling the question of whether the story can be done justice without the light gameplay mechanics getting in the way, or if that story on its own proves too insubstantial to stand alongside everything else in that medium. Either way, it's not a huge recommendation from me but it's certainly something I was intrigued to finally discover, especially given where Japanese adventure games were at in 1992 (this game literally released the same day as the PC Engine CD-ROM port of Hideo Kojima's Snatcher, which probably didn't do it any favors).

Sony PlayStation: King's Field (FromSoftware, 1994)

Whether you're a From fan who jumped in at Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, or Elden Ring, you've probably been fascinated enough to want to check out by their earlier, more shaky output before they became household names. Even myself, who became acquainted with From through their PS2 output, was late to the party and there's been an inkling to embark on an unholy pilgrimage of sorts to where they started out right at the dawn of Sony's own hardware forays: King's Field, a 1994 launch game for the first PlayStation. Said PS2 output by the way included King's Field IV: The Ancient City: the (presently) final game in that series of languid, atmospheric first-person dungeon-crawlers that made up for its graphical limitations with a great deal of eerie tension, a decent chunk of subtextual worldbuilding, and a high difficulty bar to overcome. To go all the way back to not only this series roots but FromSoft's whole deal with morose RPGs more broadly is something I've been meaning to do for quite some time now, and this feature felt like the prime opportunity to finally get on it. For a little more clarification here: the King's Field with no numeral that the US saw is actually the second game, which doesn't qualify for a fan translation feature like this given it was officially localized by American publishers ASCII Entertainment and European publishers SCEE, but this first game has remained stubbornly Japan-only. Of course, nothing's stopping From from remastering all four of these games and dropping them into a compilation in preparation for, say, the announcement of a modernized King's Field V in the vein of their similarly modernized Armored Core VI (their next oldest series). Well, a guy can dream at least. Maybe once they're done with all that PvP stuff I've no interest in.

Though relatively simple to look at, you still get a sense of that foreboding that makes these real-time dungeon-crawlers tick.

Back to getting murdered by skeletons and tree monsters in King's Field 1, this is the sort of game where you'll either want to make your own maps or surreptitiously check an online one because the game's not going to deign to make one for you—coherent 3D map tech is perhaps beyond this era, at least until we get to Daggerfall in 1996—and similarly the game has a few adventure game style puzzles to resolve before you can make progress. For instance, to open the way to the second floor you need a key held by a priest, and that priest will only trade it with you for a holy cross that was stolen from him. You find the thief deeper into the first floor, a fence who has plenty of goods to trade, so by selling some of the otherwise useless treasure found elsewhere on the floor you can get that cross and subsequently the key downstairs. Or you could see where else that key fits, since you've probably found a bunch of locked doors already. At that point you'll realize just how many doors and chests are locked by keys you won't find until quite a bit later: the game loves its backtracking, and from what little I've seen of its teleporter system you can access most floors from that initial landing area in case you ever feel like trudging back with a new key in tow to see if there's anything you can use.

These treant guys are kinda sinister but are fortunately rooted to the spot, making it a bit easier to fight (or avoid) them. That is, until you get to the next floor and they're suddenly following you around...

Combat is fairly basic: you can have a magic spell assigned to one face button and a melee attack assigned to another. Movement is similar, though since we're early in the PlayStation lifespan there's no native analog controls yet though the emulated version maps the D-pad to the analog stick for you all the same. Collar buttons strafe while the triggers let you look up and down, so you could theoretically map all those to the other analog stick if you felt inclined. Either way, it's more accessible than you'd dread from such an early experiment with 3D gaming on consoles and the combat's slow enough that you can approach its systems gingerly enough, keeping out of range of enemy attacks by backing or strafing away from their blows while waiting for your next attack to charge up (there's a slight cooldown, and attacking before it ends produces a weaker hit). The game's level-up system is this odd thing where you gain XP by defeating enemies (that part isn't weird) but the game is secretly also tracking how you're defeating enemies—either melee or magic—and then boosts the appropriate stat after an invisible XP gauge is filled. Far as I can tell, you're always getting stronger or, uh, more magical and it doesn't necessarily correlate to your XP gain: I typically see a "strength/magic increase" pop up while my foe is still alive. Either way, a level up system that adapts to the player's preferred playstyle is always a neat system to see in a game of this vintage; presumably it was inspired by a similar character progression system in 1987's Dungeon Master, which this game owes more than a small debt to in other aspects as well as a fellow real-time crawler. Of course, the Dark Souls way of assigning stats yourself is still preferable in the long-run.

Yeah, no shit. His skin fell off.

I've currently explored most of the first floor—the few remaining locked rooms contain either teleports to other floors or high-level treasure, if I had to guess—and have checked out a good chunk of the second. Without trying to spoil myself too much by checking the RA set I can tell there's four floors, or maybe a fifth that just has the final boss on it, and a whole bunch of weapons, armor, and other items to find on each though presumably not always on your first visit. Notably there's an achievement for using a "truth mirror" on most of the game's enemies and NPCs, as some sort of early means of picking up incidental lore about the world and its denizens that later From games would instead consign to item descriptions. I've yet to find one of these mirrors but I did meet a guy who wanted one, so maybe I either find two or I've got a small window to use the mirror on as many things as possible before I give it away for, I'm guessing, some key item I'll need. Using magic definitely helps defeat more troublesome monsters with poison or paralysis attacks (though both those statuses go away on their own pretty quickly; it's not like some older RPGs where getting poisoned might as well be a death curse at low levels) but recharging it is a pain: you either have to retreat to the first floor where you can activate a HP/MP replenishing fountain or else use these very rare and valuable healing items that refill both gauges. MP doesn't seem to come back on its own and there's no resting mechanic, so if you wanted to be the magic-flinging type there's probably some very specific way you have to go about playing the game or else spend an awful lot of time running back and forth to that fountain. Maybe that's something they make a bit more convenient for that character build option in later games (I really wish I could remember much about King's Field IV; I might be due a replay if I decide to move onto KFII and KFIII later).

Thanks for stopping by, vaguely elfin faceless mannequin. Now get out of the way so I can open the chest. We're still at the stage of From where I care more for treasure than lore.

At any rate, since I've maybe played about 30-40% of the game so far so this will have to be a two-parter review, moving into next week where I'll have a bunch more of these language-barriered obscurities to discover. Much of this week, I'll admit, has been spent watching a grown man in an ape costume play one of the densest collectathons ever made so I didn't get a whole lot done in my own gaming time but I should at least be able to make some progress in two more fan-translated games (small hint: we'll be repping the DS and SFC next time) by the following weekend. Until then, I'll catch all you crestfallen warriors and beaver botherers later.